11 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall

Leonard Cohen’s posthumous The Flame (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) opens with “Happens to the Heart,” a poem written in the last year of his life. “I was always working steady / But I never called it art / I was funding my depression / Meeting Jesus reading Marx,” it begins. Cohen, whose awards are too numerous to mention at length, but include accolades ranging from the 2011 Glenn Gould Prize to a posthumous 2018 Grammy for best rock performance for “You Want It Darker,” died at the age of 82 the night before the 2016 presidential election. A few weeks before, he’d told a reporter he was “ready to go,” but was planning to put together the book that became The Flame—a compilation of poems and song lyrics alongside illustrations and select entries from his journals—before he did. Fans will be moved by the intimate look inside the brain of the legendary (and multi-talented) songwriter. (Amazon.com)

2/11

From W. W. Norton.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

In two deeply researched articles for Vanity Fair,Michael Lewis, the author of several best-sellers including The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, took readers into the depths of the Departments of Energy (September 2017) and Agriculture (November 2017) in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The Fifth Risk (W. W. Norton) compiles these two exposés and adds a third deep dive, this time into the Department of Commerce. Lewis points to trends across all departments, the strongest being the lack of expertise and knowledge those new departmental leaders appointed by the president are exhibiting; given that the federal departments are essential for keeping the government running smoothly, Lewis’s findings are especially unsettling. (Amazon.com)

3/11

From Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen may be best known for his novels (Purity, Freedom, The Corrections), but arguably the most controversial of the literary Jonathans is also a prolific essayist. In The End of the End of the Earth (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a collection of personal essays that range in topic from his love of wild birds (which is vast) to an appreciation of Edith Wharton to a post-9/11 musing, Franzen displays his signature precision and deadpan humor. Come for the snappy sentences, stay for Franzen’s explanation of his public fight with the Audubon Society, which once called his stance on bird conservation “odd climate neo-denialism.” Inside baseball at its finest. (Amazon.com)

4/11

From Simon &amp; Schuster.

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister’s 2016 All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation made waves for its exploration of how the American single woman was growing as a demographic, and therefore becoming an increasingly powerful political and economic force. Now, two years later and months into the Trump presidency, Traister returns with Good and Mad (Simon & Schuster), which speaks to the current zeitgeist by looking at its historical precedent. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could,” she writes, quoting Abigail Adams’s words to her husband, John, in 1776. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.” From suffragettes to #MeToo, Traister’s book is a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively. (Amazon.com)

5/11

From Harper.

The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

In The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters (Harper), New York Times best-selling authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger paint a lush picture of the complicated relationship between sisters Jackie Onassis and Lee Radziwill, from their childhood spent in eleven-room New York apartments, to their high-profile, high-drama marriages and affairs, and to their separate attempts at sustaining careers (to varying degrees of success). Gossipy gems are studded throughout the book, which is made up in part from frequent Vanity Fair contributor Kashner’s pieces for this magazine: when Jackie met the then-congressman John F. Kennedy, she was working as the Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Cameragirl” and asked him, “If you went on a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?” (Amazon.com)

6/11

From Cornell University Press.

Professor at Large: The Cornell Years by John Cleese

Compiled from a series of talks that the great wit John Cleese has given as Cornell’s guest lecturer from 1999 to 2017, Professor at Large (Cornell University Press) offers a fascinating insider look at the mind behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. Cleese’s lectures are, expectedly, equal parts entertaining and thoughtful, and include a discussion on screenwriting, notes on religion and satire, and tips on fostering creativity, which include marrying a so-called “tortoise mind” with a “hare brain,” and learning to promote a near dream state when exploring new ideas. (Amazon.com)

7/11

From Hachette.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

The origins of Billion Dollar Whale (Hachette) go back to 2015, when co-authors Tom Wright and Bradley Hope—Wall Street Journal writers who have both been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes—began reporting on a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund following rumors about its huge debts and sketchy business dealings. The book provides a definitive, gripping inside account of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal (known as 1MDB) involving the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s channeling $700 million from the government-run strategic development company 1Malaysia Development Berhad to his personal bank accounts. The real center of the story, though, is an innocent-looking Wharton grad by the name of Jho Low, the Penang-based financier embroiled in the scandal who, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, managed to swindle roughly $5 billion, pulling off one of the biggest financial frauds in history—and exposing the secret nexus of finance, Hollywood, and politics in the process. (Amazon.com)

8/11

From Spiegel &amp; Grau.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose previous books—Sapiens: A Short History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow—took a sweeping look back at humanity’s past and forward to its future, now turns his focus to the present with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Spiegel & Grau). That he’s completing the trilogy now is opportune: this is a particularly confusing time to be alive. “In a world deluged by irrelevant information,” Harari writes in the introduction to his new book, “clarity is power.” His contribution to clarity: 21 succinct lessons for humanity to understand the world as it is today. In the days leading up to Homo Deus’s U.S. publication, Harari discussed the current climate in a TED Talk conversation with Chris Anderson: “I think the basic thing that happened is that we’ve lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what [was] happening in the world,” he said. Harari marks 2016, the year the U.S. elected Trump as president, as a turning point—“the moment when a very large segment [of the population] stopped believing in [the] story. . . . And when you don’t have a story, you don’t understand what’s happening.” (Amazon.com)

9/11

From Columbia Global Reports.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World by Bethany McLean

Ten years ago, a lot of people hadn’t heard of fracking, but today, this process of collecting oil and gas from shale rock is well-known. In the past few years the practice has boomed, encouraging those in the energy industry, Wall Street, and politics (including the president) to hope—and ambitiously declare—that it’s just a matter of time before America becomes completely energy-independent, ending the U.S.’s reliance on foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia and Russia. The journalist and V.F. contributing editor Bethany McLean, who closely covered the Enron scandal, co-authoring the 2003 best-seller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, takes a closer look at this lofty goal in her new book, Saudi America (Columbia Global Reports), undermining the enthusiasm of energy-independence claims—but not for the reasons we would assume. “The biggest reason to doubt the most breathless predictions about America’s future as an oil and gas colossus has more to do with Wall Street than with geopolitics or geology,” says McLean in an introduction to her book—in other words, it’s not a well-positioned, predictable supply of oil and gas on U.S. soil that’s creating the buzz around this energy stream. Rather, McLean suggests, the boom should actually be attributed to low interest rates. “Questions about the sustainability of the boom are no longer limited to a small set of skeptics,” she writes, predicting how this burgeoning industry will affect our own politics (as it threatens Saudi Arabia and Russia’s energy dominance) and bringing in the industry’s key players, including the late Aubrey McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, the fracking start-up which grew swiftly before failing spectacularly. (Amazon.com)

10/11

From Catapult.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

The memoir All You Can Ever Know (Catapult) is written with all the style and narrative of great fiction, so it’s no surprise that acclaimed novelists Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere) and Alexander Chee (Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night) have sung its praises. The debut, written by Catapult magazine’s editor in chief, Nicole Chung, traces the author’s life from being put up for adoption by her Korean parents when she was born prematurely in a Seattle hospital, to being raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. Chung describes a childhood of constantly being the only nonwhite child in the room, of never seeing people who looked like her, and of facing prejudice because of it. As these and other layers of the seemingly uncomplicated adoption come to light, Chung highlights the difficulties not only of her unique situation, but of adoptees in general. In a recent article about the book, Chung wrote, “I often wonder if I would have become a storyteller if not for adoption. On the one hand, that is in my genes: my birth father is a writer. Yet I do think it was partly feeling like an outsider—not just in my white family, but in the place where I grew up—that made me almost desperate for a way to express who I was.” (Amazon.com)

11/11

From Scribner.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce by Colm Tóibín

Lady Caroline Lamb used the phrase “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” to describe her lover, Lord Byron, in the early 19th century. (Lady Caroline notoriously exceeded Byron on all counts, and he ended the affair after only months. Her subsequent wrath resulted in a scandal that forced Byron to leave his home country of England.) Irish writer Colm Tóibín, the author of fiction (including 2009’s Brooklyn, the basis of the 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan), nonfiction, and two plays, re-purposes Lady Caroline’s words for the title of his new book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know (Scribner), which explores the relationships between these three iconic Irish writers and their fathers. The book, a reckoning with the greatness of Tóibín’s literary predecessors, introduces the dads through the Dublin neighborhood where they all lived and worked (Beckett also makes an appearance), reflecting on modern Irish cultural identity in the process. Tóibín concludes the book with a poem by James Joyce, written on the occasion of his only grandson’s birth, titled “Ecce Puer” (literally translating to “behold the young boy”):

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!